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Joe: Income inequality the issue of our time

Top Talkers: The 85 wealthiest people on the planet now have as much as wealth as the bottom portion of the world's population, according to a new Oxfam report. The Morning Joe panel discusses the findings and what can be done.

2 out of 3 Americans dissatisfied with wealth inequality

In the United States, 67% of Americans are displeased with the ways income and wealth are distributed, according to a new poll.

Exactly three-fourths of Democrats said they were “very” or “somewhat” dissatisfied, according to the Gallup poll published Monday. Surveyors recorded 54% of Republicans agreeing to the same question.

Additionally, 24% of Democrats and 45% of Republicans said they were satisfied.

Additionally, Oxfam International recently found the wealth of the 85 richest people in the world is equal to the collective wealth of the poorest 3.5 billion people on Earth. The richest 1% of the population - with an estimated worth of $110 trillion - control 46% of the world’s entire wealth.

“I really think this is the issue for our time,” co-host Joe Scarborough said on Tuesday’s Morning Joe. “We’ve got a system that is not just rigged by politicians in Washington, D.C.”

Americans remain less optimistic about economic opportunity in the country than before the financial crisis of 2008. Legislators expect President Obama, who spoke in December about prioritizing lowering income disparity, to address the topic in his State of the Union speech next week on Jan. 28. He declared growing inequality and lack of upward mobility as the “defining challenge of our time” in his address to the country on Dec. 4, 2013.

Gallup randomly questioned more than 1,000 U.S. adults between Jan. 5 and Jan. 8 as part of the “Mood of the Nation” survey.

“This is not about party,” Scarborough said. “We’ve got a systemic problem, a generational problem, and we’ve got to fix it or this country is not going to look like itself and this world isn’t going to look like itself 15 years from now.”